Oh, snap!
by Peruna
Summary: Because Thanos's plan was stupid. Also Spoilers for Avengers: Infinity War.


AN: Moi moi. Wow, I should really stop with these stupid One Shots. But anyway, here's another one, just for fun. Since I've been writing a lot of first-person present tense lately, I thought I'd go back to my original favoured perspective. It was kinda hard, to be honest, to go against habit, but here we are. Feel free to comment. Oh, and, I shouldn't have to say this, but **SPOILERS FOR AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR.**

 **I do not own ... anything from the MCU.** (not sure they could sue me for anything in this one shot, but better be safe than sorry)

Today was a big day. Everybody was excited. All the people involved landed on the emotional range between giddy and apprehensive, but they had all been working toward this event for the past few years and now it looks like they could maybe finally make progress on the project!

At the Suzhou Zoo in the Jiangsu province of China, zoologists from all over the world had devised a way to save the Yangtze Giant Turtle. With a new technology and the female ready for another round of artificial insemination, another attempt to breed the last captive pair of the species was ready to be made. Now they only had to capture the male to exctract the sperm from the elderly animal.

A pair of caretakers donned their protective gloves and stepped into the enclosure where the giant turtles lived, tempting them to surface from the murky water with offerings of food and treats while another caretaker hid with a net to fish out the male once he showed up. It takes a while, but then a pointed snout lifts from the pond followed by the unattractive face that only a mother -and the zoologists currently fighting for the survival of its kind- could love.

For a moment the large, leathery turtle simply floated and observed the caregivers with its ninety-year-old eyes. One might think that a being three times older than any human it came into contact with, might have been wise enough to learn from the past that this was a set-up. Luckily, turtles are not the smartest animals and that was certainly true for this individual, because it started approaching the food after only a moment of dull observation.

The caregivers didn't net it as soon as it came into reach though, feeding it in bits and waiting for the other to come up. Just because the casual viewer couldn't distinguish Susu and Xianxiang didn't mean that the caregivers couldn't. This was Xiangxiang. Probably. She didn't have that rugged edge to her that the more aggressive Susu had.

Soon enough, the male showed up as well, with all its turtle swagger and snappish behaviour. Him the caregiver did net immediately, not really wanting to risk him biting them. It took all three of them to haul him out of the water, but that wasn't unusual. Now, they had to sedate him and get him to the vet's department of the Zoo and everything would work out fine.

Behind the first three, another team rounded up the female. It would be best for her to be available as soon as they were done with the male. But before they could even think of catching the slippery and spooked animal, the first of the men started to feel uneasy. A tingling sensation taken over his limbs and confused he brought up the hand that stopped feeling to his face, only to look on in confusion as it flaked away into nothingness, shortly followed by the rest of his body.

His colleague screamed as his long-time friend turned into dust before his very eyes, then started begging to whatever was causing this to stop when he had to witness more and more people disappearing into thin air all around him. The lone reporter vanished as her photographer snapped pictures of the gruesome event, tears in his eyes. In the crowd of watching zoo visitors, children started crying as parents and siblings became nothing more than ashes in the wind.

And last of all, the last known female of the Yangtze Giant Turtle species dissolved until she was little more than a slightly muddier spot in the murky water of the enclosure. Half of all living things had died. Conservationists will mourn the day that some megalomaniac from outer space killed the last chance of saving endangered species by killing off half of the already small populations. And the people that died, too. But mostly the poor animals.


End file.
